Open Source NLU - Alan Nichol, Rasa

Aside from having an excellent product, one of the best ways to foster adoption is by building community support early on. One company that has reaped the rewards of taking this approach, is Rasa, an open-source, natural language understanding framework that helps companies build mission-critical contextual assistants, and its co-founder and CTO, Alan Nichol, joins us today. 

We kick this episode off by learning more about Rasa’s mission to become the no-brainer technology for building conversational AI. They are achieving this through their relentless commitment to community, developer empowerment, and by what Alan calls a ‘no fairy-dust attitude.’ Building conversational AI is not easy, which is why Rasa is inviting developers along for the journey. From there, we move onto why Alan believes it’s important to get products in front of users at soon as you can. Rather than waiting for full development, if you get what you can into people’s hands and let them use it, the feedback will be much richer, culminating in a better outcome. 

We then move into discussing the benefits of open-source. There are almost an infinite number of advantages according to Alan, from increased innovation surface area to the ability to squeeze out extra performance. However, the financial realities are important, and we discuss how Rasa’s enterprise products fulfill these needs. 

We round the show off by diving into the five levels of conversational AI and where we currently are, why intents are hindering the scalability of these products, and what’s in the pipeline for Rasa. 

Links from the show:

• Alan Nichol on LinkedIn
• Alan Nichol on Twitter
• Alex Weidauer on LinkedIn
• Rasa
• Rasa Enterprise
• University of Cambridge
• Docker
• Elasticsearch
• Jovo
• Rachael Tatman
• Rachael Tatman on LinkedIn
• Eddy Travels
• Git

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